A Practical Guide to VOC Research For Service Providers

When you’re first starting a service-based business, you have to try lots of different things until something works. Everything is an experiment—from the content you create to the services you offer.

Eventually, you want to start making more informed decisions. As a service provider, every decision you make in your business needs to come back to the clients and customers you serve.

That’s where VOC research comes in!

What is VOC Research and Why Does it Matter?

VOC stands for Voice of Customer. VOC Research is when you listen to your customers to learn about their problems, desires, and hesitations. After listening, you organize and analyze that data so you can apply it to your business.

If that sounds complicated, just remember:

💡 VOC research is the act of listening to your clients and giving a damn about what they have to say.

As copywriters like to quip, “Copy isn’t written; it’s assembled” (it’s a popular paraphrase from Eugene Schwartz’s Breakthrough Advertising). The fundamental building block to assembling conversion copy is out of the mouths of your clients.

VOC Isn’t Just for Big Companies—It’s For Service Providers and Coaches, Too

You might have heard that large corporations, particularly SaaS companies, are VOC fanatics. And for good reason: studies have shown that companies that conduct VOC research spend less on customer service, have higher employee engagement, and retain customers far better than companies that don’t.

As a service provider, though, you might not be thinking about “customer retention” or “employee engagement.” But you should still be conducting and collecting VOC research! Most service-based businesses depend on repeat clients, referrals, and word-of-mouth marketing. You have to know what your clients are thinking and feeling, especially as it relates to your offers.

Here’s how you can use VOC insights in your service-based business:

• write and talk about your offers in a way that connects with your audience
• improve your client experience so that they come back to you again or refer you to their friends
• create new offers or products that you might not have thought of before, but that your clients want and need from you

Listening carefully to potential, current, and past clients helps you connect with them on a deeper level and improves every aspect of your work. Best of all, you’ll feel more confident in your decisions because you’ll know what your clients want from you.

Now that we’ve discussed what VOC research is and why it matters, you’re probably wondering about the how. Let’s dive in.

Organizing the VOC Data You Already Have

Before you get overwhelmed about implementing a complicated VOC research system, let me reassure you: you probably already have some VOC data available!

Testimonials

Testimonials are the primary VOC research available to service providers and coaches. But after just a few clients, it’s difficult to remember where all of your testimonials are. Here’s the system I use to organize mine inside of Notion:

Every time a client gives me feedback—whether I’ve asked for it or not!—I add it to this table. I also like to tag mine with what their words speak to, such as my process, their results, how they see me, their investment, etc. When I’m looking for customer feedback related to a specific tag, I can filter the table for that tag.

And if you need some guidance on what questions to ask, I love and recommend Kirsty Fanton’s Social Proof Sidekick (not an affiliate link, just a fantastic product!). It’s helped me ask the right questions in the right way, and I’ve gotten much more valuable social proof from clients since going through it.

Other Sources

VOC data isn’t just limited to your testimonials. Depending on what stage of business you’re in, you might have some other places to comb through, such as your…

• email replies
• DM convos on social media
• live chat transcripts from your website
• webinar or workshop chat transcripts
• social media comments
• blog post comments
• your smile file

Go ahead and collect anything you have from the list above and drop it into a table, too. As you read through it all, you’ll probably see some patterns emerge.

Tag liberally—you can always edit or reduce the number of tags later! I like to start with tags for “investment,” “process,” “desires,” “about the offer,” and “about [the service provider].”

Gathering New VOC Data From Ideal and Past Clients

Now that you have all of your current VOC research organized, it’s time to think about how you can continuously collect these insights. There are two great ways to do this: surveys and customer interviews.

Implementing Surveys in Your Service-Based Business

It can feel intimidating to ask for feedback and survey your audience, but it doesn’t have to be a big deal. Most people are happy to answer a couple of questions, especially if you’re offering a small incentive (like a $5 gift card or a discount code) as thanks!

There are two surveys I recommend to service providers.

The insights you gain from those questions (👆👆👆) will be so useful as you craft your sales copy. And if you hire a copywriter to work with you on your launch, make sure that this kind of research is part of their process! It’s a critical step to assembling copy that connects, empowers, and converts.

Hold Voice of Customer Interviews

If you’ve got the time to hop on some calls (or can outsource to a conversion copywriter who bakes this sort of thing into their process), hold some voice of customer interviews with past clients. You’d be surprised at the information people will share with you, especially if you frame it as a way to listen to their feedback and improve your services! Use the same questions from the “Pre-Launch Research Survey” Qs above.

Make sure you ask permission to record the call so you can pop the audio into a transcription service like Otter.ai (affiliate link) afterward. Then copy any juicy bits into your VOC research table and tag away.

Finding Useful Nuggets of Insight

You’ve done the surveys and organized all those screenshots of your DMs, previous testimonials, and social media comments. You’ve even done some VOC interviews!

Now what?

The point of all this data is to apply it to your business, of course. But figuring out what data is actually helpful and what data you should ignore can be tricky.

Some researchers suggest organizing VOC into client needs, then creating a hierarchy of those needs and prioritizing from there. That’s an effective strategy for larger companies that have hundreds of survey responses to comb through.

But for service providers wanting to implement their VOC research, I recommend going with your gut more than a complicated hierarchy of needs. You’ve worked closely with all or nearly all of the survey responders, depending on your offers. You’ll know what is valuable as you read through it all.

In general, you should look for:

• repeated feedback from different clients
• unique words, especially those related to the five senses
• requests for new products
• problems you hadn’t considered addressing before, but that you could address in the future
• words related to emotions
• feedback about results

After running surveys and combining that data with the VOC that you already had on hand, it’s the perfect time to add a second layer of tags. I like to add “sticky” to tag responses with unique sensory and emotion-related words so that I can use those words in my copy. I also like to add tags like “results,” “future offers,” “hesitations,” and” -aware” for each of the 5 stages of awareness.

How to Apply Your VOC Insights to Your Service-Based Business

Finally, it’s time to implement all the data you’ve collected, organized, and analyzed.

Remember, there are 3 places that VOC insights are über useful for service providers:

• writing and talking about your offers in a way that connects with your audience
• improving your client experience so that they come back to you again or refer you to their friends
• creating new offers or products that you might not have thought of before, but that your clients want and need from you

Each time you go to write or talk about your offers, you can pull up your VOC research and refer to anything you’ve marked as “sticky,” “hesitations,” “results,” or “investment.”

When you’re optimizing your client experience, you can look at the feedback you received around your “process,” “about the offer,” and “about [the service provider].”

“Problems,” “desires,” and “future offers” will come in handy as you consider growing your business, pivoting, or niching down.

Using the organizational system you’ve put into place, you’re in an excellent spot to make decisions for the future of your business that are informed by your newfound understanding of your clients rather than your best guess.

VOC research isn’t a one-and-done process. It’s a big commitment! But by doing VOC research, you’ll be able to better connect with your clients and serve them as their wants, needs, problems, and desires evolve.

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